Date: 09/07/2019

Number: 500000

On September 7th, I attended a monarch tagging event in the port of the small community of Newcastle on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The weather was initially overcast and very cool, but monarchs were migrating nonetheless. In fact, this is the strongest monarch migration day I have witnessed in many, many years.

In this area, the shoreline drops cliff-like down to Lake Ontario, and this shoreline contained vast amounts of goldenrod, New England aster, but also many butterfly nectar plants planted by a local group.

The monarchs streamed westward, and on some occasions, I could see over 100 monarchs at once in my view. Monarchs were arriving from the north and also from the east, possibly spurred on by the approaching cold front. It is impossible to determine how many monarchs passed this site this day, but 500,000 would not be an exaggeration. The number could have been larger. Slightly west, a dried up pond filled with cattails had sloping bank that were totally covered with yellow goldenrod. In the afternoon, I estimated that this yellow carpet had about 10,000 monarchs nectaring here.

As for the tagging event, 200 attended and in less than 2 hours, 500 tags were used up. For more pictures of this amazing day, and video, go Carol Pasternak's Facebook page "THE MONARCH BUTTERFLY CRUSADER", and scroll down.

I returned to this location about 7 pm, and found a number of monarch roosts, but no very large ones.

Clarington, ON

Latitude: 43.9 Longitude: -78.6

Observed by: Donald A.
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